Financial Education
Over one in ten Story County residents lives below the poverty line. Human service providers identify poverty, including a lack of financial education, as a major barrier in their clients’ ability to overcome challenges.
The most significant way United Way of Story County is addressing this need is through the Women with Initiative program, which is supported by local caring and generous women through financial education workshops and mentoring at-risk women in Story County. Established in 2008, the Women with Initiative programs’ purpose is to align women’s leadership and philanthropy with an urgent community priority helping women achieve self-sufficiency and confidence through financial education.
Participants learn about personal finance in a four-part workshop series. Topics include budgeting and savings strategies, as well as understanding credit and loans. After a woman completes the workshop they are given the opportunity to participate in the mentor program. Mentors are trained community members with a passion for helping others. The six-week commitment to a mentor gives them an opportunity to take what they have learned in the training and incorporate that into their lives. The trained mentors serve as a resource for these individuals and helps reinforce the positive financial information they learned. Mentoring relationships can be especially powerful for single women who are trying to make tough decisions on their own, but can also be quite helpful in cases where the woman is making decisions with a partner. Mentors never tell participants what to do; they offer a resource for questions and a safe place to discuss the merits of varied financial options.
In addition to the series, the program offers booster sessions focusing on relevant topics such as shopping and meal preparation called Spend Smart, Eat Smart through a partnership with Iowa State University Extension, instruction on completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms and important skills needed to search, secure and keep a job.
Financial education workshops have been modified and presented to women at Heartland Senior Services. Past sessions have focused on preventing fraud, organizing important documents, legal issues and taxes.
In the spring of 2011, United Way of Story County created the Women with Initiative (WwI) Scholarship fund. Scholarships for up to $1,000 are awarded to the successful applicant, who has completed the workshop series, to help cover the student’s expense for their GED or post-secondary education. Awardees are eligible to receive the scholarship for post-secondary education not to exceed four years if they meet the criteria and are willing to work with a mentor for the duration of the time scholarship money is being received.
Due to the growing demand for financial education in school districts across the country and in response to the Iowa Department of Education’s new 21st Century Skills requirement of financial education, United Way of Story County advocated and provided for financial education training for Story County educators, through a three-day workshop held at Iowa State University. United Way of Story County has paid the registration fee for several Story County teachers to attend the summer workshop giving them the opportunity to learn techniques and share ideas from the teachers leading the workshop. Teachers are chosen based off of the subjects they teach in the local middle and high schools. Following the first workshop UWSC surveyed teachers to learn how they implemented this new curriculum in their classrooms. They reported being successfully equipped with impactful ways to introduce financial education to their students.
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